Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Paying the Troll Toll: Andrew Zimmern

Celebrity is fucked. Even more fucked are the expectations of a celebrity's fan base. Of course you can't be all things to all people, but at a minimum, you should be allowed an opinion. Heck, your opinion is what got you in front of the camera in the first place, right? I'm specifically talking about Andrew Zimmern, who replaced his appetite for destruction with an appetite for increasingly strange foodstuffs and became a household name along the way. It's really hard not to like the guy, or at least his media persona. Follow him on Instagram and you'll see that despite enjoying opportunities that many of us won't, he's a humble ass dude and he's truly grateful for his lot in life.

Unfortunately, here's what else you'll see, especially when he uses his personal feed (yes, he's the one posting to Instagram (I think)) for things other than travel and food: his liberal aka tolerant leanings incite a vomitous stream of hatred, whether it's his position on addiction, gay marriage, or most recently, Donald Trump.

It's nothing out of the ordinary in a place where we can all hide in a digital stream of ones and zeroes, but for someone like Zimmern who just seems like a genuinely happy guy who wants other people to be just as happy, it's a shame that we as humans are terrible piles of garbage. Buen provecho.